Walter Plecker: genocidal white supremacist, ‘Undesirables born amongst us’

How a long-dead white supremacist still threatens the future of Virginia’s Indian tribes

By Joe Heim July 1 at 7:00 AM

 

Walter A. Plecker’s goal as Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics was to ban race-mixing. He declared there were no true Indians left because of marriages with blacks. (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

Virginia’s Indian tribes have faced numerous obstacles in their decades-old quest for federal recognition. But one person has long stood in their way — and he’s been dead for 68 years.
Walter Plecker — a physician, eugenicist and avowed white supremacist — ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics with single-minded resolve over 34 years in the first half of the 20th century.
Though he died in 1947, Plecker’s shadow still lingers over the state, a vestige of a vicious era when racist practices were an integral part of government policy and Virginia officials ruthlessly enforced laws created to protect what they considered a master white race.
For Virginia’s Indians, the policies championed by Plecker threatened their very existence, nearly wiping out the tribes who greeted the country’s first English settlers and who claim Pocahontas as an ancestor. This month, the legacy of those laws could again help sabotage an effort by the Pamunkey people to become the state’s first federally recognized tribe.

[ A famed Virginia Indian tribe seeks federal recognition amid casino fears]

Obsessed with the idea of white superiority, Plecker championed legislation that would codify the idea that people with one drop of “Negro” blood could not be classified as white. His efforts led the Virginia legislature to pass the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a law that criminalized interracial marriage and also required that every birth in the state be recorded by race with the only options being “White” and “Colored.”
Plecker was proud of the law and his role in creating it. It was, he said, “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made in 4,000 years.”
The act didn’t just make blacks in Virginia second-class citizens — it also erased any acknowledgment of Indians, whom Plecker claimed no longer truly existed in the commonwealth. With a stroke of a pen, Virginia was on a path to eliminating the identity of the Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, the Chickahominy, the Monacan, the Rappahannock, the Nansemond and the rest of Virginia’s tribes.

Entering the Pamunkey reservation is a sign announcing the tribe. The tribe is the smallest and oldest documented tribe in Virginia. (Timothy C. Wright/For the Washington Post)

 

The tribal center for the Chickahominy tribe is located deep in the countryside of rural Virginia not far from the small town of Providence Forge. (Timothy C. Wright/For the Washington Post)

“He told us we had no right to exist as people,” said Powhatan Red Cloud-Owen, a Vietnam veteran who belongs to the 850-member Chickahominy tribe. “He tried to destroy a people like Hitler did. It was a genocide inside of this great country of ours.”

‘It was devastating’

Plecker. For Virginia Indians, the name is an expletive.
“I would call him the villain in our sacred story,” says Karenne Wood, 55, a member of the Monacan, the largest of the Virginia tribes with more than 2,000 members. “As soon as you raise his name, people make bad faces.”
Standing in the graveyard adjacent to the Chickahominy Tribal Center, Steve Adkins, the 69-year-old chief of the tribe in Providence Forge, about 20 miles southeast of Richmond, says he is pained by what his people endured as a result of the Racial Integrity Act.

Chickahominy Indian Chief Steve Adkins speaks about the impact of Walter Plecker on the lives of Virginia's Chickahominy tribe and Virginia Native Americans. (Timothy C. Wright/For the Washington Post)

“It forbade giving your child an Indian name,”Adkins says. “And it caused people like my mom and dad to have to go to Washington, D.C., to be married as Indians.”
Others simply left Virginia rather than stay where they could no longer call themselves Indians.
“It caused separations of families,” Adkins says. “It was devastating.”
The devastation lasted decades. Plecker directed registrars around the state to change birth certificates, to cross out Indian and write in “Colored.” He had Indian children removed from white schools and Indian patients removed from white hospitals. He pushed back against Native Americans who tried to maintain their tribal identity, and he rejected federal efforts to acknowledge the existence of Indians in the state.
“Plecker saw Indian identity as dangerous, because he believed it would simply be used as a way station by people who ultimately just wanted to be classified as white,” says Mikaela Adams, assistant professor of Native American history at the University of Mississippi. “Of course, there were many reasons that white classification in 20th century Virginia was extremely beneficial. It meant access to better schools, homes. It meant, essentially, freedom.”
Instead, Indians lost freedoms and very nearly lost their identity. That was Plecker’s goal, as he explained in a 1943 letter that he addressed to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture.”
“Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of the Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood,” he wrote. In other words, Virginia was rid of Indians.

A registration of birth and color record for children in Virginia used during Plecker’s term as the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. It required a strict definition of race that eliminated the category of Native American. This was part of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. (Library of Virginia)

Virginia would eventually repudiate the Racial Integrity Act. The law was effectively canceled out in 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an interracial Virginia couple’s right to marry in Loving v. Virginia. And in 2002, then-Gov. Mark Warner (D) officially apologized for the commonwealth’s role. But some of the damage has been irreparable.
“Plecker participated in an official disappearance of these tribes,” says Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “So he might be discredited and the official policy might be to apologize for him, but since the tribes haven’t been recognized, he still has accomplished something that has not been reversed. He’s still winning.”

‘Undesirables born amongst us’

Walter Ashby Plecker was born into a prosperous slave-owning Virginia family on April 2, 1861, just 10 days before the onset of the Civil War. His father joined the Confederate Army in the South’s fight to preserve slavery.
After graduating in 1880 from Hoover Military Academy in Staunton, Va., Plecker attended the University of Maryland Medical School where he earned his medical degree in 1885. He worked as a public health doctor in Virginia and Alabama before being appointed registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. The seemingly functionary title was misleading. It was in that office that Plecker would implement some of the most unapologetically racist government policies of the past century.
At the time, eugenics, a pseudo-scientific philosophy espousing racial purity and white genetic superiority, was gaining favor in parts of the United States, not just as a privately held view, but as a matter of public policy. Virginia was a stronghold of this nascent eugenicist movement.
Plecker was an early member of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, an organization founded in Richmond by two white supremacists that pushed for laws that forbid interracial marriage and opposed immigration by anyone other than Northern European whites.
For Plecker, who married but had no children, there was nothing lower than a mixed-race child. “The worst forms of undesirables born amongst us are those whose parents are of different races,” he said.
The Racial Integrity Act was just one pillar in the legislative legacy that Plecker and the eugenicists created. They also lobbied for the Eugenical Sterilization Act that was signed into law in 1924. That allowed the state to sterilize individuals “afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy.” That law was not repealed until 1974. In February, the Virginia General Assembly agreed to compensate those who were forcibly sterilized, paying each $25,000.

[Virginia General Assembly votes to compensate eugenics victims ]

Plecker’s impact was also felt well beyond Virginia. He lobbied the Census Bureau beginning in 1930 to stop using the category “mulatto” to count mixed-race citizens. Indicating that you were of more than one race was not allowed until the 2000 census.

Pamunkey Chief Kevin Brown goes over documents collected from England being used to prove the existence of the tribe to federal officials in Washington. (Timothy C. Wright/For The Washington Post)

Walter Plecker sent this letter in December 1943 to reinforce his views and the laws he drafted. Plecker’s policies pressured state agencies to reclassify most citizens claiming Indian identity as colored. (Library of Virginia)

 

He was obsessed with genealogy and tracing the racial background of everyone in the state. In her book, “Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries,” Old Dominion University historian Helen Rountree recalls an exchange of letters between Plecker and U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier in 1943. Collier believed that Plecker’s policy regarding Indians was too strict. Plecker countered that his policy was justified because of his extensive research into race records dating back a century.
“Your staff member is probably correct in his surmise that Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete,” Plecker boasted.
Plecker retired in 1946. Despite his outsized role in Virginia’s history, he remains a relatively unknown figure. Though the history of racism and Jim Crow is taught in Virginia’s schools, neither Plecker nor the Racial Integrity Act are mentioned, according to the Virginia Department of Education.
There is perhaps only one story about Plecker that provides Virginia’s Indians some satisfaction. On Aug. 2, 1947, a year after retiring, Plecker stepped into a Richmond street without looking and was hit and killed by a passing vehicle. He was 86.
“That was good for us,” says Adkins, with a wry smile. “He was going strong until the end. He wasn’t stopping.”

Blitz of opposition

There are currently 566 federally recognized Indian tribes, none of which are from Virginia. In order to receive federal recognition, and be eligible for the housing, education and health-care funding that comes with it, Indian tribes need to meet several criteria heavily weighted to historical documentation.
Because Plecker spent almost all of his public life trying to eliminate the recorded existence of Virginia’s Indians, it has made attaining federal recognition all the more difficult for the tribes.

Then-Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell joins the chiefs and members of the Pamunkey and Mattoponi Tribes for the annual Tax Tribute Ceremony at the Executive Mansion in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Michaele White, governor’s photographer)

 

Andrew Tyler, a member of the Cherokee tribe and a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, poses for a photograph during a break in dancing at the Chickahominy Tribal Center near Providence Forge. (Timothy C. Wright/For the Washington Post)

 

The 208-member Pamunkey tribe has chosen to pursue recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a laborious and expensive process that has lasted years. The bureau was expected to rule earlier this year on whether to grant the Pamunkey federal recognition. But at the last minute, following a blitz of opposition, that decision was postponed.

[Decision delayed on federal recognition for Virginia Indian tribe]

Leading the fight against the Pamunkey bid was casino giant MGM, which is opening a $1.2 billion casino in Princes George’s County next year and does not want competition in Virginia. The Pamunkey have not said whether they would open a casino if they were granted recognition, but MGM isn’t waiting to find out. It teamed up with Stand Up for California, an organization that has fought tribal casinos, to oppose Pamunkey recognition.
In March, Stand Up for California wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs saying that some members of the tribe descended not from Indians, but African Americans, and therefore should not be recognized. For Virginia Indian tribes and their supporters, it was galling to hear the same argument that Plecker once made now being repeated to again challenge their identity.
“The whole spectacle of folks ganging up on these tribes, in my view just promoted and funded by the casino industry, is just outrageous,” said Kaine, the senator. “They’re building off the back of a horrific eugenicist to try and make their argument.”
MGM officials rejected that characterization. “We object to any depiction that we are in any way associated with the despicable practice” perpetrated by Plecker, said company spokesman Gordon Absher. “MGM Resorts is a national leader in diversity and inclusion. Insinuations to the contrary cannot be further from the truth.”
Kaine and members of both parties in Virginia’s congressional delegation have long supported passage of the Thomasina E. Jordan bill, which would provide federal recognition through Congress for six Virginia tribes: the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Monacan, Nansemond, Upper Mattaponi and Rappahannock. To help win political support, the six tribes gave up the right to open casinos or other gambling ventures.
Kaine says he is encouraged that the bill passed out of the Senate subcommittee early in this legislative session and is hopeful that it will do the same in the House so that it can eventually be voted on by the entire Congress.
For Steve Adkins, the Chickahominy chief, federal recognition would stamp out all of Plecker’s efforts by making a statement: “We are who we say we are.”

Seth Adkins, a member of Virginia's Chickahominy Tribe, dances at the Chickahominy Tribal Center near Providence Forge. The tribe hosts a regular meeting to teach the history and culture of Native Americans. (Timothy C. Wright/For the Washington Post)

Going home

Powhatan Red Cloud-Owen’s mother, Minnie Adkins, was 25 when the Racial Integrity Act was passed. The idea that she would no longer be considered an Indian in Virginia was so distressing that she and her sister left their tiny hometown and moved to New York. There they took jobs cleaning homes, and Minnie eventually married an Indian from another tribe and settled in Queens. She was proud of being a Chickahominy and would help out at the American Indian Community House, a meeting place for Indians from all over the country who had moved to New York.
Red-Cloud Owen grew up in New York, but he spent his summers in Virginia with his cousins and other members of the tribe. At 15, he moved to Virginia so that he could attend an all-Indian school. He decided to stay for good, but his mother would never return to live in Virginia again. She died in 1974.
Before she died, however, she made a request, Red-Cloud Owen says. She wanted to be buried in the Chickahominy tribal cemetery, next to the tribal center and near the small town where she grew up and knew the name of everyone and every tree. Buried in Virginia. Buried as an Indian.

Joe Heim joined The Post in 1999. He is currently a staff writer for the Metro section's Local Enterprise team. He also writes Just Asking, a weekly Q&A column in the Sunday magazine and is the paper's resident Downton Abbey expert.

Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 has impact today

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Lewis Reynolds didn't understand what had been done to him when he was 13.

Years later, after getting married, the Lynchburg man discovered he couldn't father children. The reason: He had been sterilized by the state.

Reynolds was among more than 7,000 Virginians involuntarily sterilized between 1924 and 1979 under the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act.

Advocates for the surviving victims won a three-year fight Thursday when the Virginia General Assembly budgeted $400,000 to compensate them at the rate of $25,000 each.

 

Lewis Reynolds, 85, was involuntarily sterilized at age 13 under a state law intended to prevent "defective" people from reproducing. He went on to serve 30 years in the Marine Corps. Reynolds didn't know what had been done to him until years later. After getting married, the Lynchburg man found he couldn't father children. The reason: He had been sterilized at age 13 under a Virginia law with the stated purpose of preventing "defective persons" from becoming "by the propagation of their kind a menace to society." (AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot, Bill Sizemore)

It's welcome news, Reynolds said.

"I think they done me wrong," he said. "I couldn't have a family like everybody else does. They took my rights away."

Eugenics is the now-discredited movement that sought to improve the genetic composition of humankind by preventing those considered "defective" from reproducing. Virginia's Sterilization Act became a model for similar legislation passed around the country and the world, including Nazi Germany. Nationwide, 65,000 Americans were sterilized in 33 states, including more than 20,000 in California alone, said Mark Bold, executive director of the Christian Law Institute, which has been advocating the cause of the Virginia victims since 2013.

Virginia is the second state to approve compensation for victims of the eugenics program. North Carolina approved payments of $50,000 for each victim in 2013.

But the money from the state comes too late for most of those who were sterilized in Virginia, Bold said. There are only 11 known surviving victims, he said. Two have died in the past year, he said. Those who are left greeted the news with tears and hugs, Bold said.

The Virginia sterilizations were performed at six state institutions, including what is now known as Central Virginia Training Center in Lynchburg. When Reynolds was sterilized there, it was called the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble Minded.

Reynolds was presumed to have epilepsy. As it turned out, he was exhibiting temporary symptoms from having been hit in the head with a rock.

Reynolds' first wife left him after the couple learned they couldn't have children. He married again, and this time the union lasted. His second wife, Delores, died seven years ago after 47 years of marriage.

There were times, he has said, when he and Delores would cry about their inability to have a family.

Nevertheless, he made the best of the life he had been handed.

He joined the Marine Corps and served in two wars. He was a military policeman and a firearms instructor, at one time teaching FBI agents how to shoot. He manned a 50-caliber machine gun in Korea. He retired from the corps after 30 years and found work as an electrician. At 87, he still takes occasional jobs wiring houses.

The Virginia eugenics law was upheld in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, famously declared: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Revulsion over the state's actions brought together lawmakers from across the political spectrum, united in the belief that it was time to write the final page in a shameful chapter of the state's history.

The compensation measure was sponsored by Del. Ben Cline, a conservative Republican from Rockbridge County, and Del. Patrick Hope, a liberal Democrat from Arlington County.

"There was a growing consensus that we needed to act while we still had the opportunity to look these people in the eye and acknowledge the wrong that was committed against them so many years ago," Cline said.

The original legislation called for payments of $50,000 each. Even that amount was inadequate to address the wrong that was done, in Bold's view.

"But it's symbolic," he said. "Now the healing and forgiveness can begin."

Walter A. Plecker: America's Potential Hitler AD Powell Open Salon Oct 23 1924

MARCH 10, 2011 1:48AM

 

Walter A. Plecker: America's Potential Hitler

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NOTE: W.A. Plecker, acting as Virginia's first Registrar of Vital Statistics, was determined to "mark" all Melungeons as not-white. Here is one of many articles and essays that he wrote and published on behalf of the American eugenics movement, a movement with haunting similarities to Hitler's genocide against European Jews and Gypsies. The views expressed below are those of W.A. Plecker and his racist colleagues; they are presented here to illustrate the hostility and vigor he showed inpersecuting mixed-ancestry Americans. An excellent discussion of Plecker'sdubious "legacy" can be found in Pocahontas'People by Helen Rountree.

VIRGINIA'S ATTEMPT TO ADJUST THE COLOR PROBLEM*
W. A. Plecker, M.D., FELLOW A.P.H.A.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia
* Read at the joint session of the Public Health Administration and Vital
Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association at the
Fifty-third Annual Meeting at Detroit Michigan, October 23, 1924. This copy from The American Journal of Public Health, 1925.
When two races live together there is but one possible outcome, and that is*the amalgamation of the races. The result of this will be the elimination ofthe higher type, the one on which progress depends. In the mixture the lower race loses its native good qualities which may be utilized and developed in the presence of a dominant race.
 The mongrels are superior in mental power to the lower race. They are more cunning and more capable, but they lack the creative power of the higher race, and cannot sustain a lasting civilization that will rank with the best of the world.
 History affords many examples. Egypt in the day of her greatness was white.  But the white Pharaohs began to extend their dominion south into the negro land, and to bring back multitudes of captives for laborers and soldiers, special mention being made also in their records that women in large numbers
were included. Interbreeding with these negroes began and continued through many centuries until the country became largely negroid.
 The climax was finally reached when one of the Pharaohs took to himself a negro wife and his mulatto son Taharka succeeding to the throne. The colorline had vanished and with it Egypt's greatness. Assyrian invaders met with no effective resistance. From that day to this Egypt has been a mongrel nation, incapable of initiative, and now dependent upon foreign protection and leadership.
 India affords a parallel example. Four thousand years ago the invasion of India by Aryans occurred. These came into contact with a mixed population of white-yellow- black composition. The conquerors attempted to prevent their own amalgamation with the natives by establishing a rigorous caste system, which was not like the present one based upon occupation, but upon color.
This system failed, and though caste is still in force in India the reason for it no longer exists.
Modern South Africa is a melancholy example of what may occur when the intermixture which inevitably results is hastened by fanatical religious teaching and misguided legal interference from the mother country.  Major E.S. Cox, who spent years in that region and in other countries studying race conditions, in his book "White America," (White America Society, Richmond, VA) gives a graphic account of the struggle made by the determined colonists against the imposition. They lost out, and the population of Cape Colony province is today largely mixed, showing how quickly this condition results when the natural process is speeded up by negrophilism and the law.
Let us return now to our own country, and, as we are considering Virginia, to that state in particular.
There are about twelve million negroes; of various degrees of admixture in the Union today. Of the population of Virginia, nearly one-third is classed as negro, but many of these people are negroid, some being near-white, some having actually succeeded in getting across into the white class.
 The mixed negroes are nearly all the result of illegitimate intercourse.The well known moral laxity resulting from close contact of a civilized witha primitive race makes illegitimate intermixture an easy matter. This is illustrated by the fact that the illegitimate birth-rate of Virginia negroes is thirty-two times that of Rhode Island, while the District of Columbia rate is thirty-seven times, and that of Maryland forty-six times.
 In the days when slavery was still a blight upon our state, it was quite acommon occurrence for white men to father children born to the negroservants. The history, as related to me, of at least one colony of people known as "Issue" or "Free Issue," now spread over several counties, is that they originated in part in that manner.
It was considered undesirable to retain these mulattoes on the place, bearing the family name, and a number from one county were given theirfreedom and colonized in a distant county. These intermarried amongs tthemselves and with some people of Indian- negro-white descent, and receivedan additional infusion of white blood, either illegitimately or by actual marriage with low-grade whites.
 At present these people are claiming to be white, or Indian, and under theformer law when a person with one-sixteenth negro blood could be declared white, they were able in some instances to establish their claim legally.
 These mixed breeds are not classed as white by the people of the community, and they will not associate with the genuine negroes. Five hundred or more in number they thus constitute a class of their own, and a serious problem in that county and others to which they migrate. If refused classification as white they claim to be Indian, and as such have been accepted in the birth reports to avoid listing them as white.
 In a recent test case, the court upon evidence submitted from our birthrecords reaching back to 1853, and from the testimony of old residents, decided that these people under the new "Racial Integrity" law cannot be permitted to intermarry with whites.
Another large colony which extends over into North Carolina probably has a similar origin. We have also compromised with these, and accept certificates as Indians, which indicates to us that they are not white.
 In another county are about forty descendants of an illegitimate mating of a negro man and white woman four generations back. All of these haveformerly succeeded in being classed as white. though under the new law our office has supplied to the clerks who issue marriage licenses, school authorities, commonwealth's attorneys, physicians and local registrars, a complete family tree, with the injunction to class them as colored.
 Similar conditions exist in other localities, though not yet so far advanced. A case was recently discovered where a white man married a mulatto woman (probably in another state), and now has nine children, four of them being reported to our office as white. Investigation revealed the fact that two other women bearing the same family name had mated with white men and were raising large families of children.
 Another man whose birth was reported in 1878, both parents being registered as colored, had the court declare him a white man under the one-sixteenth law; married a white woman, and has four children reported as white by physicians.
 The question of their color was referred to our office by the school authorities when the facts were discovered, and the white school advised under the new law not to receive them, though they engaged a lawyer to assist them.
 These examples illustrate the fact that even in Virginia where the questions of race and birth receive as much attention as anywhere in thecountry, the process of amalgamation is nevertheless going on, and in some localities is well advanced. Complete ruin can probably be held off for several centuries longer, but we have no reason to hope that we shall prove the one and only example in the history of the world of two races living together without amalgamation.
In Mexico, much of South America and the West Indies the process is practically complete, the mixture being Spanish or Portuguese, Indian and negro. Some portions of southern Europe have undergone a similar admixture.  Immigrants from these lands to this country, while really negroid, are classed as white.
 Several South American countries, or portions of them, still retain a considerable degree of race purity, which is being maintained by European immigration.
The immigration law recently passed by our Congress will stop the legal admission of Mongolians and will check much of the negroid immigration from elsewhere in the old world, but it will not prevent negro and negroidimmigration from other parts of the western hemisphere. It is estimated that there are today from 500,000 to 750,000 Mexicans in the state of Texas alone, and that Mexicans compose more than half of the population of .
 But it is possible to stop the legal intermixture, and that Virginia has attempted to do in the above mentioned law, which defines a white person as one with "no trace whatsoever of blood other than Caucasian," and makes it a felony punishable by confinement for one year in the penitentiary to make a willfully false statement as to color.

 Clerks are not permitted to grant licenses for white persons to marry those with any trace of colored blood. It is needless to call attention to the sad plight of a white person who is thus imposed upon or of a white woman who under such circumstances would give birth to a child of marked negro characteristics, as will occur from time to time under Mendel's law.
The new law places upon the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics much additional work, but we believe it will be a strong factor in preventing the intermarriage of the races and in preventing persons of negro descent from passing themselves off as white.
We are greatly encouraged by the interest and cooperation of physicians, local registrars, clerks, school authorities, the general public, and even the midwives. Our success during the first four months of the enforcement of this law, in securing more accurate statements as to color on our birth certificates and in correcting previously existing errors is far beyond our expectation.
The states which now permit free intermarriage of the races, as listed in"American Marriage Laws", (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1919) are:
Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York,
Ohio, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and
Wyoming. The most urgent need is the speedy adoption by these states and the
District of Columbia of a law forbidding the intermarriage of the white and colored races.
The white race in this land is the foundation upon which rests its civilization, and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst the nations of the world. Is it not therefore just and right thatthis race decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has, to maintain its purity?
 This is working no hardship and no injustice upon the other races; for the same effort tends at the same time to maintain the purity of their races as well.
 That the mongrel races are liable to perpetuate the undesirable qualities of both their constituent stocks is abundantly demonstrated by a study of the larger and older of the mongrel groups in Virginia, as well as upon a study on a far larger scale in various other parts of the world.
The colored races therefore should be equally zealous in preventing both the legal and illegal admixture of the races. We are glad to say that the true negro of Virginia is beginning to appreciate this point and is agreeing to the wisdom of this movement. Our chief trouble is with some of the near-whites who desire to change from the colored to the white class.
 ___________________________________________________

Virginia Health Bulletin, November 1925
Vol. XVII, Extra No. 12
Shall America Remain White? *
By W. A. Plecker, M. D.
From the Booklet:
THE NEW FAMILY AND RACE IMPROVEMENT
Fifth of NEW FAMILY SERIES
Issued by
Bureau of Vital Statistics
State Board of Health
Richmond, VA
1925
* Read before Section on Public Health, Southern Medical Association,
Eighteenth Annual Meeting,
New Orleans, La., Nov. 24-17, 1924.
The negro as a laborer is valuable, and if it were possible to preserve the race in purity with him in our midst, he would be a great asset.  Because this cannot be done, and because the mixed breeds are a menace and not an asset,we have them as the greatest problem and most destructive force which confronts the white race and American civilization.
 Both remote and recent history of many nations shows that in none of them have white and colored races lived together without ultimate amalgamation, and without the final deterioration or complete destruction of the white or higher civilization.
 We behold with awe the evidences which we now find in Egypt of the wonderful civilization of the past, when that country was white. The Pharaohs extended their conquest south and brought back as captives large numbers of negro men and women. Intermixture of the races began and progressed to such a point that one of the Pharaohs took as wife a negro woman whose son succeeded to the throne. This was about the time when Jeremiah the Prophet warned Israel to break with Egypt and affiliate with Babylon.  His warning was disregarded, Egypt was as a broken staff upon which to lean. The fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity resulted.
 Egypt, then a mongrel nation, soon went down before Assyria and is today a feeble and helpless nation of brown-skinned people devoid of initiative and dependent upon white leadership and protection.
 Four thousand years ago, India was ruled by Aryan conquerors, who instituted an elaborate caste system to prevent intermixture of the races. This system failed and the few survivors who might be called white are now looked upon as curiosities.
 South America and Mexico were subdued by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, who began at once to raise up a mixed breed.
 Indians would not make docile slaves, and negroes in large numbers were brought in.
Much of South America and Mexico is today inhabited by a mongrel race of white-black-red mixture, one of the most undesirable racial intermixtures known, as I can testify from my own observation of similar groups in Virginia.
 Professor A. E. Jenks, of the University of Minnesota, and his assistant,made a house-to-house study of families the result of mixed marriages, the marriage records not even showing the color of the man and woman. These people have in Minneapolis an organization known as the Manassas Society, membership in which is dependent upon the intermarriage of a negro man and white woman. Already 200 such families are included in this society, with probable omissions.
 Similar conditions exist in many parts of the North and West. That condition alone, if unchecked, will in a few centuries legally mongrelize that portion of our country.
If we turn our eyes southward, we find a different but even more serious situation. None of our Southern States permits the intermarriage of whites and pure blacks, but all except Virginia and perhaps two others allow the intermarriage of whites with those of one-sixteenth or one-eighth negro blood.
 This serious situation calls for the speedy enactment of laws based upon that of Virginia, which defines a white person as one with no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian and forbids the intermarriage of whites with those with the slightest trace of negro blood.
 Clerks who issue marriage licenses are required to assure themselves that both parties are white, according to the new definition, when that fact is claimed and are instructed to withhold the license, when in doubt, until satisfactory proof is submitted to them.
 The enforcement of the law naturally falls upon the Bureau of Vital Statistics, to which are reported the births, deaths, marriages and divorces of the State, all of which require a statement as to color.  Our office has accepted this task and has undertaken seriously, as far as possible, to secure from all sources the truth as to this point.
 Circular letters have been sent to all clerks physicians, local registrars, undertakers and midwives, with copies of the law, urging them to use all possible care to furnish us with correct statements.
School authorities have been reached through their journal, and the public is being instructed by newspaper articles and lectures.

Racial Integrity Act of 1924

 Much interest has been aroused and many cases of mixture are being called to our attention.
When this condition is found on the birth certificate if the mother has other children, we refer back to previous births to the same parents and make the certificates agree. We have thus caught a number of families in the act of passing over from the colored to the white class, some of their children being already recorded as white and some as colored.
 Our custom is to notify the head of the family that this situation cannot be allowed and that if one of his children is colored, they are all colored.
 The case is different, however, when the process of intermixture has so far advanced that communities of mixed breeds have been formed, particularly if they have or claim to have some intermixture of Indian blood.

Virginia Health Bulletin, November 1925
Vol. XVII, Extra No. 12
Discussion (by other doctors)
From the booklet:
THE NEW FAMILY AND RACE IMPROVEMENT
Fifth of NEW FAMILY SERIES
Issued by
Bureau of Vital Statistics
State Board of Health
Richmond, VA

 Dr. A. T. McCormack, Louisville, Ky. - I had the opportunity of going to Panama, where every race had contributed something, and the negroid influence was predominant, and where degeneration of all races had been more rapidly brought about by that element. I think it of extreme importance to white civilization to prevent the contamination.

Dr. W. A. Evans, Chicago, Ill. --Dr. Plecker calls attention to the fact that, independent of the strength or weakness of the strain, when strains are crossed there is begotten a something which fails to have the characteristics of either parent stock. That is well recognized in animal breeding.
The health officer, whether working in epidemiology or not, who does not recognize racial hygiene and racial peculiarities, the advantages and disadvantages of mixing these stocks, is failing in the responsibility that rests upon his shoulders.

Dr.Geo. Dempsey, New Orleans, La. - No mixture of Japanese, Chinese, negro, etc., has ever attained the high pinnacle for which the white race is known.

Dr Carl F. Raver, Charleston, W. Va. -- During slave days it no doubt was advantageous, from a commercial standpoint, to produce as many offspring of negro parentage as possible and many slave owners must have encouraged the mixing of the races.
 This produced the mulatto. Now it is this mulatto, or his offspring, thatis causing all the trouble. They do not wish to be classed as negroes and, if light enough in color, try to pass as white and marry into white families. Every possible means should be used to prevent this. The strongest weapon is public opinion. Public opinion allowed the mulatto to become started as an institution. It condoned the situation.

 For more information please follow this link

http://historical-melungeons.com/plecker.html

Melungeons: A Singular People

 The Salt Lake Herald, June 18, 1893, Pag. 4, Salt Lake City, UT

People in this part of the country have probably never heard or at any rate know very little about the Melungeons. That is not the title of a new or old religious order. It is the name by which a body of people are known who live in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. It is but fair to them to state that they repudiate that name and declare with some show of dignity that they are Portuguese. Very little is known of their origin, but that they are of a different race from the poor whites or richer Southerners as also from the darky dwellers in that region is evident from their color, their general appearance and their ways. 

They have an account of their history which briefly epitomized is this: Many years ago some Portuguese settlers on the coast of Virginia desiring to be free from the restraints of the government, moved to the mountains of Tennessee. They made friends with the redskins, lived a free life, paid no attention to marriage ceremonies, neglected all kinds of religious observances, intermixed with the Indians and chiefly subsisted upon corn.

Of course they are now under the jurisdiction of the state government, but they are regarded as a distinct people and so treated by the rest of the population. They are tall, dark, well formed men and women, with Circassian features. They are easily excited to a quarrel, but are brave and hospitable. They despise religious forms, have no preachers and care nothing for the questions that agitate the social and political world. They now have a form of marriage but separate at will, and such easy divorce entails no disgrace among their own people. Why they are called Melungeons does not appear, but that is what they are called by the surrounding people who have little or no association with them.

 It is singular that at the close of the nineteenth century, a separate and distinct body of people can maintain their isolation and identity and be so entirely free from the influences advancements of modern civilization. Whether in their case “Ignorance is bliss” is a doubtful question. Knowledge undoubtedly brings wants and woes as well as powers, but few enlightened people will subscribe to the saying, “it is folly to be wise.”